Member-only story
Four Sh(o)utouts of Peking Opera (Part 1 of 2) :
Lu Xun, Orson Welles, Amy Tan, Chen Kaige
The abstruse, connoisseur-only theatrical spectacle of Peking Opera attracts while repulses, beckons while forbids, modern viewers, no different from the high art of European Opera. Part of Peking Opera’s lasting allure lies exactly in its shutout of the common folk, a cryptic performativity that lends itself to artistic evocations to the extent of sporadic eclectic shoutouts, East and West, verbal and visual. The dialectical swings between puzzlement and profundity, public shutout and elite shoutout, characterize and bring together, serendipitously, four transnational, glocal representations of Peking Opera. Whereas si or “four” plays with the homonymous “death” in Mandarin, the exclusive art form, an arcane, closed book to most, seduces and haunts writers and filmmakers alike, an inexplicable revenant epitomizing otherworldly wonderment. Even in the subtitle’s array of four names, the disorientation to all but bilingual readers has already wormed its way in: Is Xun and Kaige surnames like Welles and Tan? Of course, the Chinese writer and filmmaker are named in the conventional Chinese way of last names coming first, yet complicated by the fact that Lu Xun is the pen name of Zhou Shuren. Peking Opera, like the names of its literary and filmic borrowers, is elusive, verging on topsy-turviness…
